Rewilding with love

Returning to the land, falling in love with the wild

THE HOMECOMING

It felt like we never left

Have you ever found yourself in a certain place in nature, and felt like you’d always belonged there? That’s what happened the first time we arrived at La Silvestre, a little traditional olive grove in the Tiétar Valley, in central Spain.

Almost a decade earlier, poked by the nagging feeling that something fundamental was missing in our lives, we quit our office jobs in London, sold the house, and set off to volunteer on organic farms around the world, looking to learn from other ways of living closer to the earth. In 2025, that journey found its destination.

Welcome to La Silvestre.

V&E

What we're here to do

The ground we stand on

We didn’t set out to build a brand. We set out to fix something broken in ourselves — our relationship with the natural world. Slowly, trying to remember how to belong to the land, we became different people. UL is what grew out of that change.

We produce and sell the finest olive oil, grown in rewilded traditional groves, in a way that restores our relationship with nature. We’re starting with our own grove, and with producers already doing this work. In time, we want to see the whole valley farmed this way — because the best olive oil doesn’t come from a farm, it comes from an ecosystem.

UL

You have arrived

Modern life has separated us from nature, turning our relationship with food into something transactional, detached, and harmful to our bodies and to the planet. We have spent too long living outside the natural world, forgetting that our bodies speak the same language as the living earth — that we are not separate from the ecosystem, we are part of it.

UL is the closing of that divide. Our rewilded olive oil is an invitation to step back into the ecosystem where we belong. In arriving home to its true, raw flavour, you are ultimately arriving back to yourself.

UL [uhl]

To return home — to the land, and to yourself.
our core values

What we hold to

STEWARDSHIP

We do not own this land; we are its stewards.

We reject the sterile rows of extractive agriculture and choose instead to nurture a living landscape — one where native flora feeds the soil and wild fauna keeps it in balance, forcing our trees to adapt and grow richer for it. Our role is simply to protect that balance, so the earth keeps thriving long after us.

COMMUNITY

Growing together, thriving together.

As producers and curators, we bring together a community of farmers, partners and clients who share our respect for the land. For us, conservation, sustainability and regeneration aren’t labels to wear, but commitments rooted in a genuine sense of belonging. Our collective presence leaves every grove more vibrant and alive than we found it.

ONE HEALTH

Human health cannot exist in isolation from the health of the land.

We don’t manufacture wellness — we harvest it from a landscape that is healing itself. At every step, we take full responsibility for our impact, choosing regeneration over exploitation. When nature heals, we heal.

TRANSPARENCY

Open by nature.

Because we’re asking you to trust us with something as personal as what nourishes your body, we believe you deserve to know exactly what you’re putting into it, where it came from, and how it was made — no vague labels, no fenced land, and no shortcuts. In fact, we’d love you to come visit. Our groves are, quite literally, always open.

“We don't actually have a planetary problem. We don't have a biology problem. We have a relationship problem.”

- zach bush

how it started

The land that speaks

We bought this land in June 2025 with an idea for a retreat centre, but the land had other plans. Standing among centenarian trees, we realised the land was speaking — we just had to listen. That’s how recovering the grove became our priority, while still honouring our original mission to create spaces where people and nature can grow.

Helped by Adriana (our biologist specialised in ecosystems recovery) we started taking action —bird counts, placing bug hotels and bird houses, pruning, applying the Olivares Vivos model tree by tree — and it’s a story that deserves its own page (coming soon!).

we're always open

Come visit La Silvestre

Whether it’s to put up bird boxes and bug hotels, or simply to wander around the grove and discover everything that lives there, come and discover this magical place… and to taste the olive oil, of course!
Our homecoming

Rewilding La Silvestre

The land that speaks

We bought this land in June 2025 with an idea for a retreat centre, but the land had other plans. Standing among trees older than either of us, we realised it was speaking — we just had to stop talking over it and listen. That’s how we ended up recovering our olive grove instead, to produce the wildest extra virgin olive oil on the planet.

La Silvestre sits above La Parra, in Ávila, at 700 metres. Almost 3 hectares, 2.2 of them olive grove: 250 trees, most over a hundred years old, three native varieties. The rest is wild green pocket and bare granite, watched over by a centenarian stone pine we call El Guardián. The land has never been fenced — it borders the forest and neighbouring groves, and animals move through it freely.

To guide us on this path, we work alongside Adriana, our Ecosystem Recovery Expert, who helps us understand the land, restore its natural balance, and let its untamed spirit thrive.

Adriana, our Rewilding Whisperer
Hanging bird houses
Ready to work

Guardians, not farmers

Land like this doesn’t need to be controlled. It needs to be left alone, in the right ways, and helped in others.

The trees had been abandoned for decades before we arrived, so our first job is to rejuvenate the trees: pruning them back, slowly, so they can recover their strength without being shocked into it. Full production is still a few years off. But the land underneath them is already telling us something. Since the previous owners hadn’t used herbicides or pesticides, it means that the soil, the undergrowth, and the small creatures living in the stone walls around the grove have a head start we don’t have to create ourselves. We just have to maintain it and improve it.

So we brought in Adriana, a biologist who specialises in ecosystem restoration, to study the land and design a recovery plan and improvement plan. We also completed the official course run by Olivares Vivos, and we’re now applying their model for managing an olive grove in a way that increases its biodiversity rather than working against it. We’ve applied for European organic certification through CAAE, but for us that’s the starting point, not the goal. Organic only tells you that the produce hasn’t been sprayed. It doesn’t tell you whether an ecosystem is actually healthy.

Black Kite hunting

Why it matters to what’s in the bottle

Oil from a grove like this isn’t the same as oil from land that’s been cleared, tilled, and sprayed. Trees that have to compete a little, growing among wild plants instead of bare soil, defend themselves — and that defence shows up in the fruit, richer in polyphenols and more nutrient dense, and of course a wild flavour. We think of our own health the same way: neither one does well in isolation from a living, complex environment.

This is still early. Our own harvest is a couple of years off, so for now we’re bringing you oil from producers who share this same commitment. But La Silvestre is where the story begins, and where we’ll keep coming back to, season after season.

You’re welcome to come see it for yourself.

A new family!
Solitary bees hotel